Vanitas — an exhibition of new work by Anne Drew Potter

SEATTLE - Jan. 7, 2015 - PRLog -- Vanitas, Anne Drew Potter's new exhibition, challenges us to examine how we see ourselves in the age of social media. The exhibition opens to the public with an artist's reception at Pottery Northwest on Friday, February 6, at 6 p.m. and an artist's talk at 7 p.m. The exhibit continues through February 28, 2015.

Potter is interested in the interaction of the body with identity and narrative, and how the characteristics of identity — gender, race, age, etc. — can ground us in or exclude us from a historical/cultural place of comfort. Her anatomically informed but strange and distorted figures provide commentary using the language that society has projected onto the body. In Vanitas, she explores our struggle for self-worth, meaning, self-image and identity through the lens of our social presence and postulates: “Vanity is the vice of the digital age. We contemplate our own image in a narcissistic sea of Facebook self-celebrity, suffering ever more constrainment of the senses. We admire the obscene and unchecked accumulation of wealth, the democratization of purchasing power, authority and ownership — a psychological reality slightly apart from our shared existence.”

Potter has earned the respect of Wally Bivins, executive director of Pottery Northwest. “Anne Drew's sculpture is like a tapestry or tableau constructed of her concerns making up the current body of work,” Bivins says. “To me, over time, her figures have become like an ensemble of actors (or more likely djinns) who work together to propel the work. She is one of the gifted figurative artists who go beyond ‘a good likeness’ to encounter the questions beneath their skins.”

Anne Drew Potter is the recipient of awards from 4 Culture and Artist Trust in Washington, a past German Chancellor Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and a past Matsutani Fellow at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts. She has been an NCECA (National Council for Education in the Ceramic Arts) emerging artist, international grant recipient and several-time Biennial Invitational exhibitor. While in Germany, she received an emerging artist prize from the Keramikmuseum Westerwald.

Potter's residency at Pottery Northwest first began in 2010 and enabled the production of her solo show Captains Congress at the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh. Her work is included in the ceramic research collection of the Arizona State University Museum of Art, among others. Vanitas is funded by a 4 Culture Project Grant and a Pottery Northwest Resident Artist Project Grant.